


once i sink my teeth, your skin's not so tough.

by ohyellowbird



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: CDTH Preview Spoilers, Call Down the Hawk Spoilers, Canon Compliant, College, M/M, soft angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 11:16:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20993924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohyellowbird/pseuds/ohyellowbird
Summary: “I swear to God, Ronan. If you bring back asinglecrab tonight--”Ronan cut off Adam’s idle threat with his mouth, thieved what was left of it and all the air inside Adam’s lungs.





	once i sink my teeth, your skin's not so tough.

**Author's Note:**

> hi! i just reread trc in preparation of cdth and i'm in my fucking feelings again.
> 
> this takes place after chapter eight of call down the hawk. just a lil fic to get my feet wet. 
> 
> i'm excited to write more in this fandom. xoxo

“I swear to God, Ronan. If you bring back a _single_ crab tonight--”

Ronan cut off Adam’s idle threat with his mouth, thieved what was left of it and all the air inside Adam’s lungs. 

They were only halfway up the stairs to Adam’s dorm, but Ronan pinned him back against the plaster wall. “I’ll make it up to you,” he said, his rough, low voice a preview of what was to come. He pulled hungrily at Adam’s lower lip with his teeth, at his hips with his hands. His kiss scorched a path beneath the cut of Adam’s jaw, terrorized a red mark above his collar.

Adam struggled to keep his head above water, panting out a signal flare of breath, face tipped heavenward, eyes closed. “Ronan,” he sighed, pawing at Ronan’s hulking shoulders, “not here.”

Ronan scoffed into Adam’s throat, hands creeping under his Harvard sweatshirt to hold the bare column of his waist. “Why not?” 

“Because anyone can see,” Adam managed. Ronan’s teeth were fighting with the collar of his shirt.

“Good.”

There was something hidden in his tone that wasn’t stubbornness, or want. Adam would rend Ronan’s head back with a fist in his hair, but he didn’t have any. His hand fit itself around Ronan’s neck instead, pressing against his windpipe when he didn’t want to relent.

Ronan drew back, a leashed dog, and stared at him, thick lashes low over his eyes. He didn’t say anything. His mouth had been burnt pink by Adam’s stubble.

“Are you jealous?” Adam guessed quietly, and from the way Ronan stepped back before disappearing up the stairs after a moment more of looming, he knew his aim was true. 

Ronan was standing at Adam’s desk when he walked inside, his back facing the door with his head bowed to read something in one of the open textbooks. Adam found himself lost in the fine details of Ronan’s tattoo where it had bled out above his t-shirt. Delicate wisps of linework that took shape only when the entirety of the design was revealed. He remembered studying it at the Barns the night fate finally took them.

_Unguibus et rostro._

By the time Adam left the warm-tinted memory behind, Ronan still hadn’t said anything, or moved. Adam began to close the space between them, his footsteps slow and purposeful against the hardwood. “Enthralled by population growth in Ancient Greece?” He meant for it to break the suddenly stilted mood, but Ronan denied his attempt easily. 

He did not do as well denying Adam’s hands, thawing when one coasted up his spine to trace over the strands of black ink on his nape while the other smoothed around his middle. 

Ronan was built with muscle underneath the armor of his black t-shirt. He had dragged his body over the line separating a boy and a man through his work on the farm and sheer force of will. And _God,_ Adam had missed it. After nearly a year of having all of Ronan, always, these short visits weren’t enough. He had been gluttoned with their time and now he was starving.

Ronan took a deep breath that swelled against Adam’s palm. Then he covered that hand with his own, tracing the creases between Adam’s fingers with his fingertips. 

“I don’t want you to worry about my friends,” Adam said, leaning his forehead against the sloped hill of muscle between Ronan’s shoulders. “I love you.”

It wasn’t the magic phrase it had been in preview arguments. Ronan didn’t turn and kiss him and take him to bed. If anything, his head just fell lower. “One of them would be better for you,” he said at last, and even though his tone was disguised as accusatory, Adam saw it for what it was. Fearful.

Adam stepped back but only as a means to spin Ronan to face him. “You’re wrong.”

“I fucked up yesterday,” Ronan admitted, eyes darting toward the broken window pane, the floor, the wall. 

Adam didn’t bother reassuring Ronan about that. His sheets still smelled of exhaust. “You’ve fucked up a lot,” he agreed, quickly adding on, “and so have I. But that doesn’t change how I feel.”

Ronan didn’t look convinced. His stare was bald and heavy. “I dream a motorcycle into your room. I’m not in school. I don’t have a job.” 

The only way to stop his grocery list of faults was to physically stopper them. Adam pushed a hand out against Ronan’s mouth, thumb held under his chin. “Shut up, Lynch.” His eyes above Adam’s pinky finger were dull. He wasn’t just lashing out. This has been weighing on him, breaking up his idea of their relationship’s foundation.

Ronan didn’t try to move Adam’s hand.

“We’ll figure it out,” Adam told him. Promised him. “The dreaming. The future. All of it.”

Ronan didn’t try to move Adam’s hand but it fell away anyway, the air in the room crackling with a charged silence before they gave in and crashed together again.

It was lips opening lips for tongues to meet and hands fighting with clothes, wanting them closer together, wanting to feel nothing but skin.

Adam let himself be walked over to the narrow single bed, his back arching in an attempt to keep them kissing that only resulted in Ronan toppling over him. Bare chests meeting again, he hissed, drawing his legs up, the heels of his feet propped against the frame of the bed with Ronan stretched between his bent knees.

The desk lamp in the corner was hardly enough to see by, its wattage too low to reach much of the room. The soft glow from it rendered Ronan a gentler kind of beautiful than he truly was. It airbrushed the harsh planes of his face and made wings out of his eyelashes. Adam had long since suspected Ronan of being a god, and in this glow he looked like one that specialized in what he chose to dream: light and love and life. 

The real Ronan, scowling and severe, looked like he would readily hold dominion over murderous crabs.

Adam loved them both.

“When’s your roommate coming back?” 

“I don’t know,” he told Ronan, matching his need, both of them breathless already. Yesterday they had time to reacquaint themselves with each other’s bodies, awake into the early morning twisted in the sheets. Adam couldn’t barter for privacy two nights in a row.

Ronan’s hand goes to Adam’s buckle, thighs splaying around his hips to give himself room to tear the fastenings apart.

“I said--”

“I heard you,” Ronan said, cutting over his words. “Pull the sheet up.”

Adam protested silently.

“Fine, make me do all the work.” With a great deal of effort, Ronan rearranged them on the mattress. He hauled Adam up by the armpits, draping him against the pillows, and then took to excising the blankets out from underneath him. Huffy, he finally laid down beside Adam, ripping the covers up to conceal them both, and then immediately went back to taking Adam out of his pants.

If Adam wasn’t so horny, he would have laughed. No, he did laugh, a little. And rolled his eyes. “Wow,” he said, his eagerness to drag Ronan in by the neck undermining his callous tone.

They were kissing again until Ronan got a hand around him, warmth sealing around his cock. Then Adam couldn’t focus on the mechanics of it, jaw working like a fish out of water. He dropped his head to Ronan’s shoulder, anchoring a hand around the side of his throat while the other played uselessly at getting Ronan’s black jeans undone.

Mercifully, Ronan helped him there, and in no time they were rutting together into the loose claw of Ronan’s hand. Adam raised his head to catch sight of Ronan’s face. His expression was split between something like wonder and its usual snarl. Adam traced the shape of his mouth, and when he hooked two fingers inside, Ronan moaned.

They finished like that, one after the other, Adam choking out air while Ronan pressed his teeth into Adam’s knuckles, hard.

White burst from behind his eyes, eating up everything, leaving in its wake only feeling. 

When the world remade itself in front of him, Adam looked at the door. It was still closed. Panting, he replaced his fingers with his mouth, remembering kissing again and hungry for the simple joy of it. Ronan fed him little sighs and sounds, a vulnerability that would dam up again once his post-orgasm fog burned away.

Outside noises and the ruckus going on in the common room downstairs filtered back in through his good ear. Adam was happy to have it joined with Ronan breathing next to him. A spark of sheer joy ran through him at the possibility of Ronan really moving to Cambridge and allowing him this on a regular basis. Maybe he didn’t fit into the life Adam has created for himself on campus, but he could definitely co-exist. 

Home for Adam was a person, not a place.

“An asshole farmer with no job and no prospects,” Ronan said next to him, breaking the silence, sated with one hand on his stomach. Adam would argue with him but there was a smile to his voice. “I’m lucky you have such low standards, Parrish.”

Adam’s only retort was to hit him, a half-assed whack that landed against the center of his chest. Ronan caught it. “Yeah. Right.” 

He felt sleep pulling at him, and with it, an icy fear for what he might wake up to find. There were still fresh scabs on his arm and thigh from the unexpected guests this morning. Not to mention a bill for damages that far eclipsed his monthly income.

In the end, though, it didn’t matter. After a short tiff about whether or not Ronan should stay, he and Adam drifted into unconsciousness together. 

They dreamed of Lindenmere.


End file.
